IE10 Compatibility Changes

Purpose

Changes to Internet Explorer 10 were designed to better comply with broader industry standards, provide consistency with modern browsers, and to improve performance and reliability.

This section describes features that operate differently in Internet Explorer 10 from earlier versions and identifies things that may require changes to sites and apps built to support earlier versions of the browser.

Note You may be able to use legacy document modes to emulate the behavior of earlier versions. Should you choose to do this, be aware that this is a temporary solution at best. Starting with Internet Explorer 11 Preview, document modes are consider deprecated and may not be supported in any future versions of the browser. For best results, you should update your sites and apps to use features and techniques supported by industry standards and multiple browsers.

This article describes how pages function differently in Windows 8 between the familiar Internet Explorer for the desktop and Internet Explorer in the new Windows UI. It also describes best practices for building touch-first sites. These recommendations apply to both browsing experiences of Internet Explorer 10.

In Internet Explorer 10, we've modified the default behavior of quirks mode to improve support for industry standards, such as HTML5, and to increase interoperability with other browsers. Quirks mode now exposes the same set of APIs and behavior as standards mode with limited exceptions as defined in HTML5 and related W3C specifications.

Downloading files is a very common activity, and in Internet Explorer 10 we made several improvements in the file download experience and integrated the SmartScreen Application reputation check to help users make better trust decisions. This article summarizes many server side customization options available with the Microsoft Download Manager so that developers can provide the best file download experience for users.

The Internet Explorer 10 user-agent string has been updated to reflect the new browser. As a result, websites that use browser detection might not work correctly when attempting to parse the Internet Explorer 10 user-agent string.